Hello! Bonjour! Hola!

So, I finally got around to making a backyard-chickens account for myself. I've been raising chickens here in The Silicon Valley of California for the past six years now. I started off with a flock of eight bantams (a buff silkie hen, white silkie hen, partridge silkie hen, white wyandotte hen, a plymouth rock hen, blue silkie rooster, a black silkie rooster, and an easter egger rooster). Ever since then, I've been gradually increasing the size of my flock (also having to replace ones that have died). My second set included two silver spangled hamburgs and a bantam mottled cochin. The third set included a creme legbar, olive egger, and blue easter egger, and the last/most recent set included two white silkie bantams, a bantam easter egger, a bantam black cochin, a standard white cochin, a super blue egger, and a white sultan. We do everything we can to make sure they have comfortable lives--we give them an extra square foot per chicken for sleeping space, and we let them free-range whenever we're home (being I'm not off at lectures for college or my mom is working from home for the day).

We don't have twenty-one chickens, though. Our bantam easter egger rooster (from the first set), first white silkie bantam, and buff silkie bantam all died from old age. We took extremely good care of them, and they lived very happy and peaceful lives. Our plymouth rock bantam was our best layer (aside from the hamburgs), but she died from bad crop... We didn't realize what was wrong until it was too late. We had put her in a separated "hospital coop," thinking that her ailment was a virus/bacterial infection, but didn't think to check her crop... We tried doing the "puking" method of clearing her crop (force-feed water, hold chicken upside-down, then massage crop and induce vomiting), but it was too little, too late... She died after a couple of weeks from starvation--she refused to eat, and it took us force-feeding her electrolyte water to get her to stay hydrated. The last (and most recent) one to get killed was one of our hamburgs. My mom and I were home and letting the flock roam our backyard, but we had both fallen asleep and taken an unexpected afternoon nap. While we were asleep, a bobcat ambushed our flock and chased them around. Our mottled cochin was hiding in the side-yard, where we did not expect to find her, but our (favored) hamburg was taken away by the bobcat. We didn't realize it was a bobcat that had killed and taken her away until the same creature came back later the same night and had alerted my pet cat's presence by being so close to our house.

I look forward to becoming a part of the backyard-chickens community! See you all on the forums

Greetings from Kansas, heinkmeister, and . Pleased you joined our community! Sounds like you've been through a few trials and tribulations on your chicken journey. Hope your future adventures are all positive. Thanks for joining BYC and best wishes!

Welcome to Backyard chickens. Are you allowed to use electrified fencing around your coop/run? That might send the bobcat packing. I think it would be good to post on the predator threads for advice on bobcat protection. They are nasty.

Hi there, and welcome to Backyard chickens! I am glad to see you look like you are taking great care of your chickens, but sorry to hear about that bobcat. My coop is mobile, surrounded my a mobile electric fence, so when the grass gets eaten and trampled, I move it all to a different part of the yard to fresh grass, the hens love it, and in a much safer environment. I hope you enjoy BYC as much as I have.